Speaking of odd things in Germany - Europe, too, for that matter - it seems I’m not the only one who’s picked up on a little matter involving Super Short Shower Screens. You know - the ones that just have a glass screen wrapping part way around that seem to encourage rampant spraying? Andrew in Deutschland: I can sympathise!

Now, oddly enough, the Germans are my most favourite people in the whole world, so on account of that it’s okay for me to pick on them from time to time.

Let’s start with the whole eating-meat-at-breakfast thing. Sure, I’ll admit – I’ve never been one to shy away from a solid bacon fry-up, especially on a hangover. But the leberwurst – yes, that’s liver sausage – and brie combo that I’ve seen done on breakfast rolls here is just appalling.

Secondly: fizzy water. And yes, I admit – I had been warned. Many a friend had come back from Europe, and Germany in particular, lamenting the lack of regular water. Two of my early discoveries in the country were that 1) it’s nigh impossible to locate still water in Germany; and 2) if you shake a bottle of mineral water it certainly does explode in your face when you open it.

It took a full three weeks of living in Konstanz before we discovered an untapped resource of still water (ie. a dodgy little store round the back of the train station in town) and we were thrilled to bits with our new discovery. Odd how the most boring beverage back home is elevated to the highest pedestal when not easily accessible.
On another water-related note – and this is for the girls out there – do take careful note: German rain does not, in fact, make your hair go frizzy (this is very important and something that women the world over should be made aware of).

Having lived in Germany for months on end, I unravelled one of the country’s best kept secrets.

It’s the mystery that has confounded tourists and immigrants alike for generation upon generation re. fashion in Germany. Outside of the fashionably unfashionable Berlin, that is.

It’s not the wearing of double denim (that’s denim on both top and bottom) or the fluro strap around the ankle of pants to keep them off the bike chain. It’s not even the tucking of one pant leg into the sock to do the same.

No, it’s worse still: the case of the High-Pants Harry/Helga. You all know what I’m talking about: waistlines up to the armpit, cheek splitting wedgies, that sort of thing.

According to my latest research, the phenomenon can be broken down thus:

1. Germans ride bikes EVERYWHERE;
2. it’s COLD in winter;
3. sitting on a bike seat (frozen, at this point, might I add), necessarily entails the dreaded forward reach to the handlebars;
4. in doing so, the wearer of fashionably low-slung jeans is liable to experience the predictable kidney freeze that comes from exposing a strip of flesh to the (unreasonably chilly) elements.
ERGO…the abnormal prevalence of the High Harry/Helga waistline throughout Germany.

So now you can all stop wondering. Do, please, let me know if anyone has since invented clothes that meet in the middle that don’t simultaneously involve atomic wedgies, that is.

For anyone on the verge of a heart attack or those who just like über tranquility for the hell of it, Reichenau Island, near Konstanz in southern Germany, is the place to be.

It’s listed as a World Heritage site for its monastries so that was ostensibly our reason for biking out there, but more importantly, we (and by we, I mean I), needed the exercise. Predictably, though, the rental man hand-picked for me a bike specially constructed for midgets, where my knees were alternately up around my ears and dragging on the gravel.

Also predictably, we hung a misguided left and found ourselves on the ’scenic route’, weaving past the sewerage dump; once on Reichenau, though, we only shattered the peace once when I tried the ‘Look Mum, no hands’ trick and ploughed face-first into a greenhouse.

The real fun started in the evening when we rode out to Konstanz’s second island, Mainau. The catch here is that it’s €15 entry during daytime but free after 7.30pm. It seems they try to deter people from night entry by not putting up one streetlight (and our bike-rental man was in on the ploy too, by giving us bikes with broken lamps).

Safely on the island at last, we popped the red wine then realised it couldn’t be re-corked so we’d have to polish off the whole bottle, and quick smart too because the island closed for the night at 9pm.

Needless to say by the time we rode home, heavily under the influence and in pitch blackness, we were both in need of quite the Dettol bath.

That two-week slump of idleness in Germany came back to bite me in the bum big time. A mate from Sydney who’d been living in Italy – the ever-athletic Kylie – arrived in town; and she didn’t come quietly.

‘You’ve been WHAT?!’ she cries.

‘Sleeping till 2pm EVERY DAY!?! That’s DISGUSTING. Now, just you tell me something, you giant sloth of a girl - ‘ (here she lowers her face down to my level) ‘ - exactly what HAVE you achieved in the last fortnight?’

‘Well, um…’ I stutter feebly. ‘Um, I did go to the gym one time. Because I had a free voucher. But it’s…well, it’s just that it’s been raining, so…’ I trailed off meekly.

‘Raining? RAINING?! It’s been three below and SNOWING in L’Aquila and I’m up at 5:30 every morning for a 10km run followed by ten thousand sit-ups three dozen chin-ups a couple of hundred one finger push-ups and three hours of pilates! And that’s just before BREAKFAST!

‘YOU,’ she seethes, grimly collecting me by the throat, ‘you, my girl, are in for some BOOT CAMP of the highest order.

‘Right,’ she says briskly, straightening up (I’m surprised she doesn’t have a whistle around her neck). ‘First step is to set the alarm for - ‘ (insert ungodly hour here) ‘ - and you’d better be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my friend, or I will have no choice but to open a CAN’ (of whoop-ass, I’m assuming she meant).

‘By the way,’ she says, snatching a couple of bottles of vodka and three packets of chocolate biscuits off my shelf before flouncing out - ‘I’m CONFISCATING these.’

It took some time to recover from the incident of the Dorm That Never Sleeps. Luckily for me and my sanity, I soon discovered that life overseas is not always about Adventure and Experience. Sometimes it’s got a lot more to do with Slothing Around.

I studied in Konstanz for a year so couldn’t always be on the road. There were months of just living life in Germany, which tended to involve lots of beer and bratwurst, and little of anything else. I found this diary extract just recently.

sixteen days in konstanz: a summary

- ratio of daily sleeping to waking hours: 16:8
- amount it’s rained: enough to flood most of southern Germany, Switzerland and a little bit of Austria
- what I’ve achieved: coveted title of World’s Most Bored and World’s Laziest Person (aka Best Impression of a Sloth award)
- nights we’ve ended up at the world’s tackiest club, ‘Dance Palace’, just because there’s simply nothing else to do: 12
- kilometres run in effort to exercise: 0.4
- sit-ups completed: 4
- serious attempts to find work on ‘Das Boot’ (a party boat that sails the lake on Friday nights): 1. Ended in failure because unbeknownst to us we happened to be recruited for ‘Erotisches Nacht’ and personally I’m just not broke enough yet to work topless…
- Critical injuries: 1: the burning of Steve (my flatmate who was accidentally set alight when another, slightly unhinged visitor threw lighter fluid on the barbecue. Doesn’t help that at the moment the most popular song on German radio is the new Anastacia one called ‘Everyone burned’…

Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s had to deal with troubled sleepers while slumming it in hostel dorms. It appears I’m also not the only one who’s been snored out of my own bed in Copenhagen. Suspiciously, this dorm looks uncannily like the one I was in…If I remember rightly, it was called the Sleep-in Heaven. Oh, the irony.

There are two things you need to be able to travel with any success anywhere in the world. One of them, as brought to light in my previous post, is a common language. This may involve mime if necessary. Next on the list, but no less essential, is sleep.

Sleep is something it’s tough to get a lot of when you’re on the road. And don’t let ineptly named hostels like the Sleep-in Heaven in Copenhagen fool you. I could have had a better night’s sleep in the lock-up.

I’d just flown in from Germany and was in the nauseating throes of recuperating from an unfortunate incident involving the notorious Berlin currywurst and my untrained stomach. I would have given my own mother – and she is, let me tell you, quite an estimable one – for a good night’s sleep.

I found myself in a fourteen bed dorm - that’s me and thirteen troubled sleepers. There was so much snoring, snorting, sneezing, wheezing and coughing - oh the COUGHING - going on that I barely slept a wink and was up at dawn, grumpy as hell and making a true racket with my pack and my locker just to show them…well, you know, to SHOW them. Yeah.

I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but the following night was equally as disastrous due to the exit of the cougher but the appearance of a new snorer. There was only one thing for it. Coffee.

And I don’t even like coffee.

People often ask me if I miss Australia. They sing me the “I still call Australia home” song form the Qantas ad and to check if I start blubbering. I never do.

But - and here it comes - I must admit: at times, a little more sun would be good. Europe’s tops; it’s just a bit miserable looking at this time of year. I did, however, just stumble across this photo essay on mid-winter in Australia. Typically, it still looks bloody fantastic. Hmph.

I’ve pasted below for your mild amusement the transcript of a conversation between my travelling mate and I and the manager of the hostel in Sixmilebridge, a tiny Irish town in the midst of nowhere. If you’re Irish, please get back to me with an explanation immediately.

Manager: Welcome, lassies, to our fine wee town…Now let me recommend you a thing or two. You could go catch a movie…
Us: Oh, great, so there’s a cinema here?
Manager: Oh, no, lassies, certainly not…but there’s one in Limerick.
Us: Fantastic. And how do we get to Limerick?
M: Well, let’s see, you’d ‘ave to catch a bus…
U: And what time does the bus come?
M: Oh, the bus stopped runnin’ in 1984.
U: Uh huh. And what about an internet cafe?
M: Oh, no, certainly not, there’s no cafe, but you can use the internet for free at the library in town.
U: Great. What time is the library open til?
M: Golly, no, the library don’t open til September.
U: Right. There must be somewhere we can get something to eat then?
M: T’be sure, m’wee chickens, we’ve got a restaurant right here on the premises…
U: Super, what time does it open?
M: Oh, no (chuckles), it’s not open after noon.
U: Ok…what about in town? There must be somewhere in town we could get some food?
M: Sure, sure, at O’Malley’s y’ can get t’ree.
U: Tree? We can get tree?
M: That’s right, t’ree!
U: Right…tree?
M: T’ree! T’ree t’ings - cheese sandwich, toasted cheese sandwich, or a cheese sandwich with Guiness. Or - wait - a toasted cheese sandwich with Guiness. Truly, lassies, we livin’ in the golden age!